For the average eater — for you and me — ice cream is more than something to eat. It's a buoyant, feel-good state of mind that conjures languid summer evenings, birthdays, white trucks with tinkling melodies, warm pie, hot fudge.

For dairy-food technologist Steven Young of Steven Young Worldwide, however, it's business. When he talks ice cream, he uses terms like "execution" (as in, the concept was good but the execution was not), "leverage" (as in, with its Extras line, Häagen-Dazs attempted to leverage the success of Ben & Jerry's) and "engineering nutrition" (yes, people actually ruminate on how to fortify the stuff with good-for-you vitamins and minerals).

For all its "fun and frolic," Young says, ice cream is a serious, even stressful business.

"People say, 'Geez, it's only ice cream.' No, it's not just ice cream. There are people who spend all day long, their entire career, making sure ice cream is safe and suitable for human consumption. I don't think people understand the amount of human energy that goes into making a half-gallon of ice cream."

Dairy dynasty

Young practically grew up in the business. His father, a cheese man, worked for Kraft for 40 years.

"His claim to fame? He developed the cheese powder that goes with Kraft Macaroni & Cheese," says Young, who consults for the big boys of the ice cream industry from his sunny home office in West Houston. "My dad used to say if you can understand milk, you can understand anything."

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The younger Young heeded that advice, earning a bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. in food technology from Cornell University, concentrating on dairy. He worked for Quaker Oats and Dreyer's, witnessed firsthand the birth of Tofutti, then followed his wife to Texas and ventured out on his own. The couple now work together.

Recently, as the heat index climbed along with ice cream sales, Young talked about what's hot in the world of cold. He admitted that, "as one guy said to me a long time ago, 'If you can't have fun with ice cream, you can't have fun, period.' "

To begin, flavor preferences: City folks like black walnut, Northeasterners coffee, Midwesterners butter-pecan and Californians toasted almond. As for those wacky Philadelphians? They demand that their vanilla ice cream be flecked with vanilla bean.

"Everywhere else people think they look like insect specks. But in Philly it's not vanilla ice cream without them. You know," Young adds confidentially, "there is no flavor in those specks, because all the vanilla has been extracted. It's just a visual."

Consumer trends

As Young sees it, three trends dominate today's ice cream landscape, affecting what you find on supermarket shelves.

• Rapid growth in the low-fat ice cream category. Ultralow-temperature freezing has resulted in "incredibly smooth ice cream," he says. "Low-fat tastes as good as the high-octane stuff."

As a result, sales have doubled to a roughly 20 percent share of the market, dominated by such products as Breyers Double Churned and Dreyer's Slow Churned.

• The growth of a category known as "frozen dairy desserts." Such items don't meet the Food and Drug Administration definition of ice cream — they contain too much air — but "they look and behave like ice cream," Young says. "They have been able to engineer (things) so they eat like a traditional ice cream product."

He cites Dreyer's Loaded line as an example.

"Companies are saying, 'Hey, listen, I can come up with new and novel products, offer fewer calories, if I just decouple myself from the world of ice cream. If I decouple, I can loosen my tie and be more innovative.' "

• The "third coming" of frozen yogurt, which has been "on life support, if you will." A brief history of frozen yogurt, according to Young: It emerged in the 1970s, but the product wasn't tasty and disappeared. It rebounded strongly in the 1980s. In the 1990s, a consumer switch to low-fat and no-fat ice creams, triggered by a change in labeling laws, caused its near-demise. Now frozen yogurt has been reborn again, evidenced by the popularity of Dreyer's frozen yogurt and Pinkberries, a chain coming on like gangbusters in California.

Young also lumps several trendlets into something he calls "organic-green-fair-trade-country-of-origin." Ben & Jerry's sells a fair-trade vanilla ice cream in Europe, which gives sugar-cane growers and vanilla producers in the undeveloped world "their fair share of the pie," as Ben & Jerry's puts it. Also, ice cream makers are starting to pay attention to the concept of country of origin — for example, buying all their vanilla, cocoa or coffee beans from a single country or region and marketing that fact to consumers.

Vanilla, incidentally, is the flavor of choice if young is evaluating a batch of ice cream. "Only vanilla will tell me what's going on." But such testing is not ordinarily a part of his job.

A typical day's work for Young is to develop new ice cream products, assess new ingredients, solve manufacturing glitches, save ice cream makers money. Oh, plus he co-authors a column for Dairy Foods magazine and co-teaches an annual industry class on ice cream technology.

So who gets to taste the ice cream? Are there any openings, by chance?

Tasters are trained quality-assurance people who work in a lab, Young answers. Serious people, who keep ice cream on their tongues for "unusually long periods of time" and who spit and wash out their mouths between tastings.

The job is beginning to lose its luster. Next question: Do you have a favorite ice cream?

"It's like a fine wine," answers Young. "Everybody has a different perception."